Europe needs to make some very big technology bets — with EU financed venture capital money

Synthetic biology is one area that may merit large-scale investment in benign applications

Here’s my pitch: Europe should abandon risk-averse penny-pinching conservatism in its science and technology R&D budgets, and join the USA and China in the major league of big spenders on speculative technology development — the league of nations that will own the future. I’m going to suggest a vehicle that would, if applied, almost certainly catapult Europe into the neotech big leagues in a single mighty jump.

The way forward is a unique public-private partnership funding model that will enable brilliant but underfunded ideas dreamed up in laboratories, most of which never get anywhere near commercialisation given our current dysfunctional system, to cross the valley of death and emerge onto markets, brought into the world by game-changing new technology companies whose goals, means, and products are useful, powerful, and benign.

What kinds of technologies? Let’s look at a few examples of solutions we could bring into the world. To generate them, we merely have to be willing to make the necessary large-scale, generously financed speculative venture capital investments — without losing sleep over which specific bets pay off and which don’t. That’s really all there is to it. We know all these things will eventually become technically feasible…given sufficient investment:

Healthier, longer life. How about a cure for coronary artery disease, which remains the leading single cause of premature mortality world-wide? Or what about using rejuvenated stem cells to grow replacement organs? Or reprogramming your immune system to recognise and destroy cancer cells more effectively? What about (nearly) defeating the common cold by means of advanced fast-response vaccines, so you spend much less time ill each year? How about ending malaria?

Safe energy, stable climate. Would you like to see a rapid and permanent end to the fossil-fuelled era by a combination of cheap, efficient solar cells, next-generation batteries, and (maybe) fourth-generation molten-salt nuclear power systems that burn up ‘spent’ nuclear fuel rods (which in fact still have 95% of the uranium unfissioned within them, and aren’t really ‘spent’ at all)?

What about a cost-effective way to remineralise the excess carbon already dissolved in the oceans, to restore them to vibrant health? And while we’re at it, would you like to see a cheap, efficient way to turn seawater into ultra-clean freshwater, so the drylands can bloom?

Hummingbird steaks. Are you up for an industrial-scale, cruelty-free process for growing sheets of muscle tissue without growing the whole animal, so you can eat hummingbird-meat steaks, with no hummingbirds harmed in the process? (There’s no reason to limit yourself to beef, chicken, pork, or mutton if you can grow any kind of animal muscle tissue at all in sheets in a factory.)

Would you like your salad greens, cherry tomatoes and broccoli grown hydroponically, with no pesticides or herbicides, on land currently taken up by supermarket parking lots, so you can buy tomatoes produced locally rather than trucked in from thousands of km away? And what do you say to a process for efficiently making clean, nutritious proteins, fats, and carbohydrates out of electricity, carbon dioxide, water, and a few trace minerals, using reprogrammed yeast or micro-algae grown in vats? Taken together, these technologies could enable us to achieve food security even as we allow most of the world’s farmlands to return to forest. Sound good?

Ubiquitous self-paced learning. How about a cheap internet-connected virtual reality headset that teaches illiterate folks in the hinterlands how to read and write, do their bookkeeping, improve their gardening, carry out electrical wiring, water system installation, medical self-help, and many other skills, in a way that’s fun and accessible for them?

You like these ideas? Me too. It’s pretty clear that every single one of them is almost certainly doable — eventually, given enough time, effort, and investment. And there are clever engineers and scientists in labs around the world working on most of these solutions right now.

But there’s a problem, a break point: The overwhelming majority of those researchers are so under-funded, so overworked, so overwhelmed by paperwork, so constrained by lack of business skills, and above all so frustrated by a general lack of patient, very-high-risk-tolerating, long-term-perspective-taking venture capital, that there is no realistic way for most of their brilliant ideas to ever get out of the laboratory and into your hands. That means we’re going to let you live a shorter life on a deader planet, because we couldn’t see our way clear to making the necessary investments to solve atherosclerosis, skin cancer, and climate-stabilising carbon drawdown systems — even though we know we can solve these problems if we really try!

If we really can do all this, why wouldn’t we? Why don’t we?

There’s a way to solve this problem. It’s not even complicated. The way to solve the problem is to throw money at it — not randomly, not stupidly, but in a targeted, systematic, and intelligently managed way. And in this essay, I’m going to propose the outlines of how to do it.

But first, let’s be clear about why we aren’t already implementing more than a fraction of the amazing solutions technologies that we know are possible in principle. The simple answer is that the people in charge of investing money into technology solutions are generally too risk-averse, because their highest priority is to avoid losing money. It’s completely understandable; they can’t be blamed for it. Their job is to invest money and get a positive return on investment on that money. But that approach to investing doesn’t generate the highest possible returns to society as a whole.

Very few private financial capital pools are willing to throw enormous sums of money at technology development schemes that will take more than a decade to come to fruition, and may never work out at all. There are some such pools, but they aren’t the main thrust of the private VC investment world. That world’s main thrust is: Evaluate several hundred startup proposals, pick one of them that your VC team thinks has a high chance of succeeding and allowing an ‘exit’ within five, or at most ten years, and invest in that one. Over a few years, slowly build up a stable of ten or twenty startups that you nurture, always looking for that big (and hopefully fast) exit.

It isn’t reasonable to expect private financial capital to make big financial gambles on unproven technologies — or mere applied-science ideas — that will probably require pumping huge amounts of money into technology R&D for ten or twenty years before they finally reach market readiness. Yet that describes most of the technologies I mentioned in the introduction.

So where does that leave us? Your first reaction might be to say: It leaves us with public funding for research and development in universities or engineering institutes like Germany’s Fraunhofer Institutes. And yes, that’s right. But it’s not good enough. There’s a piece missing.

The piece that’s missing is public venture capital that does not require early-stage co-investment by private venture capital.

Here’s the problem: Managers of public research and development funding — civil servants or peer-review committees — aren’t rewarded for taking big risks and spending prolifically, either. It doesn’t help their careers to spend money on projects that take forever to show progress, or that fail. Civil servants tend to be cautious, mainstream-consensus-seeking, risk-averse managers, not mavericks, experimentalists, or wild-eyed entrepreneurs.

Existing public venture capital funding — the kind of money technologists can apply for by filling out very lengthy and detailed forms for review by committees of civil servants — almost invariably only offer matching funding at best. In other words, they require the project proponent to find some private investors first, on the (probably generally correct) theory that private investors will be careful with their money and will take a hard look at a project before investing in it. The matching-funds requirement reduces the risk that public money will be ‘wasted’ on dud projects. It also reduces the scope for civil servants to engage in graft by allocating public money to their cousin’s fraudulent pseudo-project.

As a result of these factors, both private VC money and public R&D money are incentivised toward choosing projects with a high likelihood of short-term project success, and biased against choosing investments that are likely to take a decade or even two decades to come to fruition, or are very high-risk, or both together. Yet nearly all of the nifty technologies and outcomes described above — the biomedical breakthroughs, the fuel-recycling fourth-general nuclear systems, the carbon drawdown solutions, the synthetic biology food production systems — will require huge investments with uncertain outcomes to be pumped into myriad competing projects, many and perhaps most of which we can expect will fail, over at least two decades.

There’s more scope for chasing wild ideas in an academic research context, but if we want to actually turn those ideas into real-world solutions, merely funding scientists at academic institutions won’t cut it. The competition for academic research funding is fierce; there’s never enough. The rank-and-file researchers are grotesquely underpaid grad students and postdocs, who spend a few years researching some niche aspect of a system, and then write up a report and go off (most of them) into the ‘real world’ and do something else entirely. That’s not how marketable products arise — least of all big-science products like hummingbird-meat factories or gigatonne-scale carbon sequestration systems. Kernels of interesting ideas can and do arise in university labs, but most of them are never given anywhere near the scale of time, effort, and focused attention from hundreds of engineers that are needed to operationalise them.

So what we need is a machine for spending vast amounts of money and effort over a two-decade time-frame into each of several dozen world-changing technology Grand Challenges, fully accepting and anticipating that most of the money spent on attempting solutions will be “wasted,” yet recognising that if vast amounts of money are not spent on these Grand Challenges, they won’t be solved (or won’t be solved nearly as soon as they might have been), because there’s no way to know in advance what will work. Risk aversion is not your friend if you’re trying to solve a technology Grand Challenge. Nor is a short-termist desire for a quick venture-capital ‘exit.’ Nor is that all-time favourite of the German virtues: Sparsamkeit. Sparsamkeit (penny-pinching frugality) is your worst enemy.

Your friends are scale, competition, ambition, and clarity of goal. Here’s one way it could work: Suppose you’re a sponsor with truly deep pockets — the kind of pockets only first-world governments own. Suppose you’re a specialised Solutions Fund set up to solve a particular Grand Challenge. Malaria, for example. Suppose the EU’s leaders decide to get serious about this, and accept that it will cost a lot of money over a long time-span. So they allocate the Malaria Challenge Fund a volume of ten billion euros (in anno 2015 constant euros) per year, and agree to keep funding it for 25 years, or until malaria is gone from the planet.

But how can they spend the money effectively? It’s not enough just to have a huge budget. Who will decide how to spend it? And how?

Here’s where the ‘public-private partnership’ comes in. Management of the Malaria Challenge Fund is allocated to a team of very smart people, chosen from several professions (most but not all of them field-experienced biomedical and environmental scientists; also some engineers and finance whizzes). They’re given a two-page brief that sets out the objective, which in this case is to permanently eliminate malaria from the planet without causing an ecological catastrophe. They are also given a set of escalating financial rewards: Suppose there are twenty people on the Malaria Challenge Fund investment team. Each of them will be given 50 million euros if they succeed in eliminating malaria within seven years, 25 million if they succeed in 14 years, or 5 million if they succeed in 21. (To keep things fair, there are special rules for prize-money sub-allocation if team-members leave before the problem is solved, with peer review processes from the remaining team playing a key role.)

Now, the investment team splits up the €10 billion euro pie that it has to spend yearly, every year for as many years as it will take to eliminate malaria from the planet. What’s the best way to do that? That’s up to them, but here’s one way that might work:

Divide the money into 40 slices of €250 million each. Use this money to fund 40 different malaria solutions startup companies and joint ventures. In each case, the Malaria Challenge Fund keeps 50% of the equity of all these startups and JVs, on a non-declining basis, regardless of future investment rounds. The other 50% is allocated to the key researchers and entrepreneurs that form each team. There is no requirement for private-sector matching funding. If, years later, the more successful amongst these companies start recruiting private investment money (after they’ve demonstrated sufficient value to be considered an acceptably low-risk, short-term investment to attract private money), then the equity dilution occurs only on the side initially allocated to the researchers. This allows the Malaria Challenge Fund to retain formal control, and prevent companies it invests in to go off in undesirable directions, e.g. by getting greedy about pricing models, or careless about the ecological consequences of particular solutions.

Now after three years, the first cohort of companies invested in would be evaluated, and of the initial 40, further funding for perhaps 10 would be discontinued, leaving 30 companies eligible for a second three-year round of funding. This would be a process akin to voting the least desirable players off the island in a reality TV show. At the end of 6 years, another evaluation would ensue, and several more companies would be voted off the island, with the remainder eligible for another round of funding. And so on… a third round of funding after 9 years, a fourth after 12, a fifth at the 15th year, and a sixth at the 18th year, if necessary (my guess is that it won’t be necessary: five rounds of funding of the scale envisaged will likely be enough to develop the technology necessary to solve almost any problem). The investment teams would be expected to ensure that at least 3, preferably 5, companies would still be up and running at the end of the several rounds of investment, so that market competition will continue to exist amongst mature solutions delivery companies.

The €10 billion budget allocation in the second 12 month period would be distributed similarly. So by the end of Year Two, 80 companies in two sets of 40-company competitions would be working to solve malaria, each funded with an initial €250 million investment. In the third year, the annual €10 billion budget would be allocated to the 30-odd ‘survivors’ amongst the first set of 40 companies; in the fourth year, the annual €10 billion budget would be allocated to the 30-odd ‘survivors’ amongst the second set of 40 companies. In the fifth year, the €10 billion budget would be spent on field trials of the best available anti-malaria therapies available at that time. And so on.

Don’t worry if this seems confusing. I’ve left a lot of details out, and in any case, all the details are subject to discussion. This isn’t the place to set out the fine details of the investment mechanism. Instead, this is where we can get a picture of the general approach, which is to establish enormous public venture capital funds that are managed by teams of private experts, whose members are incentivised with very large rewards if they succeed in achieving a clearly stated Grand Challenge goal.

There will, of course, need to be peer review systems, transparency of accounts, and harsh penalties to deter graft or theft on the part of the investment management teams.

Now, how many Grand Challenges could the European Union afford to fund at the scale of €10 billion per annum?

Given the extraordinary rewards of solving any of the Grand Challenges we have been thinking about — for example, achievement of permanent fossil-fuels-free energy abundance, climate stability through gigatonne scale carbon resequestration technologies, food security via synthetic biology, cheap seawater desalination to allow every desert to bloom if we choose to make it so — we don’t need or want to be Sparsam. Trying to be frugal and penny-pinching is exactly not the point. It’s not a good idea to “save money” on penicillin if you have a bacterial infection attacking your heart valves — and the side effects of human civilisation on the biosphere are all too analogous to a bacterial infection attacking one’s heart valves.

Let’s suppose we set up 25 Grand Challenges, and fund them at €10 billion per annum each. The total spending would be €250 billion per annum. Is that a lot of money?

It’s about half as much money as the OECD estimates the USA spent on research and development in 2016 ($511 billion), three-fifths what the Chinese spent ($452 billion), and about three-quarters as large as the estimated $379 billion that was spent on R&D in the EU in the same year.

So yes, €250 billion is a lot of money. But it isn’t a crazy amount of money in context. Converted to US dollars, €250 billion was worth $279 billion USD at time of writing. If Europe had added that amount to its estimated 2016 R&D spending of $379 billion (a figure that includes private industry and public R&D spending together), it would have meant that total European spending, at $658 billion, had pulled slightly ahead of US spending at $511 billion — which is appropriate, since Europe’s total population is about 1.57x that of the USA (513 million people in the EU, 327 million in USA). Total 2016 EU R&D spending of $658 billion (if we choose to look at these 25 Grand Challenge Funds as R&D spending) would then be just 1.28x that of the USA, which means European R&D spending would still lag behind that of the USA on a per capita basis!

The estimated GDP of the EU in 2018 was $22.0 trillion. Thus, $279 billion corresponds to about 1.27% of Europe’s GDP. Now Europe (like China) is estimated by Eurostat to spend about 2.0% of GDP on R&D at present, while the USA spends 2.8% and the Japanese spend 3.3%. So if the EU added another 1.27% to its R&D spending, as a proportion of GDP, it would just about match the world R&D spending leader (measured as a % of GDP), Japan.

So an annual spending of €250 billion on a suite of 25 Grand Challenge technology funds, each budgeted at €10 billion per annum each, is not a crazy proposition. It simply puts Europe into the top league, where it belongs, alongside Japan, USA, and China.

Let’s now assume the suite of 25 Grand Challenge Funds is organised into a Fund-of-Funds, and give it a European name. Perhaps we should call it The European Renaissance Fund-of-Funds SE. It would be a public company owned by the European Commission or by one of the other European institutions, in a similar sense to how the EIB is publicly owned.

There needs to be an ethical framework. Spending money on this scale could do a lot of good, but it could also do a lot of damage. Fortunately, we already have a very good set of guidelines worked out for us. We can decide from the get-go that all the projects invested in must be consistent with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, and with the tripartite Golden Rule.

The tripartite Golden Rule, also called the TriEthica, is a simple expansion of the Golden Rule — the wise and ancient principle of fair dealing and reciprocity, simply expressed as “do as ye would be done by” — in three dimensions: time, ecospace, and social space.

I propose that each project funded by the European Renaissance Fund-of-Funds should be selected and managed for consistency with the TriEthica, which is a simple heuristic checklist that can be asked in question form. Before investing in a project, as a routine, fundamental part of the assessment process, the investment team should think very carefully about whether the proposed investment is:

> Good for the children? (For those of today, and future generations.)
> Good for the biosphere? (For climate stability, biodiversity conservation, and ecological health.)
> Good for each other? (For the counterparties involved, and those most directly affected by the technology or project.)

In fact, a good alternative name for the European Renaissance Fund-of-Funds SE might be the TriEthica Fund-of-Funds, to keep minds focused on spending the money wisely. But let’s go with ‘European Renaissance’ for now. The word ‘Renaissance,’ which is French for ‘rebirth,’ captures the spirit of the thing rather well.

Notice where I’m proposing this money would be spent. Most or all of it would be spent on capitalising private for-profit companies. (There’s no reason why an additional few billion euros a year couldn’t be set aside to improve conditions in Uni or institute research labs, but let’s stay focused on the road to commercialisation of these crucial Grand Challenge technologies. It’s no good having great ideas if they get stuck in the lab.) After ten or twenty years, the Grand Challenge Funds would each eventually be left holding 50% of the equity in a handful of extremely valuable companies. Where would the dividends flow? Well, I think they would be re-invested in further technologies. And part of the dividends flow would be used to pay interest on the Fund-of-Funds debt.

What debt? Well, I haven’t mentioned yet where the money would come from, have I? Where are these €250 billion a year supposed to come from? One can almost hear the enraged German taxpayer, shaking his fist in frustrated Sparsamkeit, eyes bulging, fist shaking, demanding an answer, now... Vot doo yoo sink yoo ah doink viss mei hahdt-örnt money!? Hoo vill pey foah oll ziss!?

There are three possible answers to how the Fund-of-Funds could be financed. One is for the EU to levy a tax on something, and dedicate the proceeds to the Fund-of-Funds. The EU could levy a carbon tax, for example. Or a financial transaction tax. Or a wealth tax.

A second answer is to issue EU-backed Eurobonds from the European Renaissance Fund-of-Funds SE in a volume of €250 billion per annum, and sell these to institutional investors. I suggest this is the most plausible approach, and I strongly favour that the bonds be structured as perpetual bonds (i.e. bonds with no maturity date), so that they will never need to be refinanced. Perpetual Eurobonds backed jointly and severally by all 28 (soon 27) EU countries will carry very low interest; a few years ago, Ørsted A/S, a partially state-owned Danish clean energy company, sold 999 year bonds that carried an interest rate of just 2.5%, so we can expect state-backed Eurobonds to carry a much lower interest rate. Perhaps 1.0%? We’ll see what the market will bear.

Now let’s take a closer look at how much money Europeans will have to spend on interest charges, if the Fund-of-Funds is funded by issuing low-interest perpetual state-backed Eurobonds.

1% of €250 billion is €2.5 billion. 2% is €5.0 billion. Somewhere in that range is the price of each year’s additional spending on this programme. Over 20 years, this would mean racking up annual interest charges of €50 to €100 billion. Meanwhile, Europe’s GDP will continue to grow from its current base of €22.000 billion. Assuming a very low GDP compound growth rate of 1.2% over those 20 years, GDP in 2039 will be about €28.000 billion. So at that point, the interest rate charges on the bonds issued at the volume of €250 billion per annum over 20 years will be in the range of 0.18% to 0.36% of EU GDP, and that’s assuming that these investments do nothing to increase the GDP growth rate from that very low base of 1.2% per annum, which is, of course, an absurd assumption. These investments of €250 billion per annum in the most crucial technologies of the future — technologies that private venture capital will certainly underinvest in, if left on their own — will of course increase the rate of GDP growth. They almost certainly will cause a rise in GDP growth much larger than anything in the 0.18% to 0.36% range. In other words, this annual €250 billion investment will inevitably more than pay for itself. It will cost, on a net basis, less than nothing. It will make a profit!

This is the price of owning the future: Less than nothing. Positive ROI. We profit.

So much for the presumed virtue of Sparsamkeit.

Note, too, that none of this public investment money crowds out virtuous private venture capital. Instead, it crowds in private venture capital, because it increases opportunities for VC investment in the later, lower-risk stages of the development cycles of these technologies. Moreover, because the technologies developed to solve Grand Challenges will necessarily break new ground, they will generate a plethora of spinoff technologies and opportunities for private VC investors to rub their hands in glee over.

I haven’t yet mentioned that there is also a third possible way to fund the Grand Challenge Funds. It’s the same as the second way — the European Renaissance Fund-of-Funds SE would issue bonds — with a significant difference: The perpetual bonds could be sold to the European Central Bank instead of being sold to private institutional investors like pension funds or insurance funds. This probably won’t be necessary, but if the ECB ever decides a round of Quantitative Easing is needed again in future, these EU-backed Eurobonds will be perfectly suitable for ECB QE purchases.

Now then. What are we waiting for?

Well, we should sit down together and figure out which 25 Grand Challenges we want Europe to invest big money in solving. And we should work out the fine details of how each of the Grand Challenge Funds will be managed.

I can’t do that on my own. I’m going to need a lot of help. This is a co-design challenge, something for teams of experts to sit down and work out in a series of workshops and round-table discussions over a period of a couple of years. We’ll want to hear from a lot of people.

That’s why, over the next several years, between now and midway through the second half of the coming decade, I’m going to try to draw some very smart people into an extended outcomes-oriented conversation about how to operationalise the European Renaissance Fund-of-Funds system, co-design its detailed financial machinery, write draft legislation, and push it into the European policy discourse until it has been adopted and made a working European Union policy. My goal is to have the Fund-of-Funds in place by March 31, 2027, the 300th anniversary of the passing of Sir Isaac Newton — at the latest.

There’s really no very good reason not to put it in place immediately, of course, but the wheels of policy turn slowly, and it will take time to co-develop this proposal with the kinds of key influencers who can secure its adoption, and work with them to market this idea to policy deciders. It will take a few years.

If you’d like to contribute advice, suggest useful interlocutors, offer seed funding, host a design workshop at your august institution, or merely blow raspberries and make rude comments, feel free to do so below — or if you think you have something particularly useful to say, email me at ERfunds@triethica.com.

Addendum

Here’s a reading assignment for you: To get a good overview of the enormous scale of government funding on new technology, and the consequent entrepreneurial punch that drives much of the vibrancy of the world’s biggest economies, read UCL professor Mariana Mazzucato’s book, “The Entrepreneurial State.”

The Americans spend mind-boggling sums of public money on speculative technology development. Some of the most aggressive speculative technology investment in the US gets done through military budgets channeled via agencies like DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency; ONR, the Office of Naval Research; and venture capital firms owned and run by the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies.

The US spends a bit more than half of the world’s total military spending all by itself, and a lot of that money pours into technology companies in aerospace, new materials, AI, and so on. This generates a lot of entrepreneurial activity in diverse technology fields. I’m not saying the US’s overwhelming focus on military spending is a good thing — I do wish our American friends would focus more on developing solutions to save lives and regenerate the biosphere, and less on figuring out ever more comprehensively effective ways to surveill or kill people using scary gadgets. But militarism is deeply embedded in American culture — it has been since the Pilgrims first landed at Plymouth Rock — and the military-industrial complex is going to keep doing what it’s doing, come hell or climate-catastrophe-induced high water. The same might be said of the Russians and their military-industrial complex, or that of various other nations, by the way — I don’t mean to point fingers. I’m just making a fact-based observation.

The Chinese, for their part, have in recent years been shovelling subsidies toward high-tech enterprises and developments with world-beating enthusiasm, driven by a burning ambition to dominate the world’s key new technologies — AI, robotics, machine learning, aerospace, new materials, medicine, green energy, e-vehicles, hi-tech ships, agricultural systems, you name it. They do this through a wide variety of state-capitalist channels, and they don’t lose a lot of sleep over “wasted” money, because China’s governors are engineers who understand that the money they’re spending is composed of fungible points in a scorekeeping game, and that they have knobs they can turn to make the points appear and disappear. Unlike the paradigmatic Swabian Hausfrau, obsessed with Sparen, the Chinese leadership understand that modern money doesn’t consist of a pile of gold coins; that it’s much better that money circulates than that it sits inert under a mattress; and that one can always make more of it (or make some of it disappear) if there’s too little or too much of it, by simple bookkeeping operations. The main thing is, make the real economy flourish. Invest in the future. Invent. Build.

This is why the future has in recent years been invented and built primarily in California and China, much less so in Europe. It’s why the biggest new global corporations that have emerged in the past three decades are American and Chinese, not European. All of them.

The European Renaissance Fund-of-Funds would fix that. This single tool would get Europe back in the game. It’s time for Europe to rejoin the major leagues, leave the Swabian Hausfrau to her laundry chores, and engage in public-private financing partnerships that will return Europe to the centre of geoeconomic affairs, inventing technologies and building world-leading companies in the business of co-inventing the future.

Europe has a special opportunity and responsibility to help offset the tendency of some other countries to over-spend on militarism and under-spend on serving real human needs or on regenerating the biosphere. There are currently only three polities in the world able to easily afford to spend patient, long-term publicly financed venture capital on the order of €250 billion annually on speculative high-risk, high-reward new technologies: China, USA, and Europe. (India could join the game within a few years by creating its own advanced-technology Fund-of-Funds; although it would be starting from a lower base, it has an awful lot of talent it could mobilise.)

Europe’s special opportunity and responsibility is to invest in, invent, and build a UN SDG-fulfilling and TriEthica-consistent future. The European Union could very easily afford to spend on the order of €250 billion a year on that quest, and if it did so using an intelligently designed Fund-of-Funds mechanism such as the one sketched out in this essay, the subcontinent would almost certainly make a massively positive return on its investment. There is no downside.

That’s my pitch. If you like it, if you agree with it, give this story a clap, or add your comment below. If you think you can be specifically helpful, get in touch with me at ERfunds@triethica.com.